The Historv of Colour in Art Dn:i Bomford Introduction k is almost impossible for us to know just how colourful the art of the past was. We can hardly begin to imagine how extraorfinarily sumptuous mediaeval and Renaissance churches and palaces appeared - with their n'all paintings, tapestries, painted architectural ornament, precious met- als, enamels, and every kind of brilliant artifact. Any history of colour in art carl only be partial, because so much art and so much colour in art has either perished or has survived only in a much changed form. We have only to think of sculpture, for example, to see how our imagi- nation fails us. With classical Greek and Hellenistic marble statues, it aln'ays comes as something of a shock to realise that they normally had realistically coloured lips, eyes, hair and clothes. We now usually imagine the antique through the practices ofRenaissance and neo-classical artists, n'ho saw Greek sculptures already stripped by time or the hand of Man of all their painted decoration. Polychromy of stone sculpture was cer- tainly normal right up to and through the Romanesque and Gothic. It n'as only in the Renaissance - by u combination of mistaken interpreta- rion of the nature of classical sculpture and a genuine interest in the nat- ural textures and colours of materials that polychromy of stone sculpture died out. Very little intact medieval polychromy of carved stone survives, but where it is found - as in the great west portal of the collegiate church in Toro in north central Spain (The Portada de la Majestad, dating from the late thirteenth century), hidden for centuries under many layers of later polychromy - then the impact is astonishing. Polychromy of wooden sculpture, of course, continued right through the Baroque and beyond. But a moment can be identified when one artist
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tones were then hatched or painted thinly on top, working in progres-sively paler shades from shadow to light; the green was allowed to showthrough in the half-tones and nicely imitated the pearly tones of realflesh. Today, many such faces are worn and damaged and the green hasbecome too prominent. cennino was very strict about this correctseq[rence for painting flesh: 'some
begin by layrng in the face with fleshcolour - then they shape it up with a little verdaccio fbrown-green shadou,,colourl and flesh colour, touching it in with some highlights and it is fin-ished. This is a method for those who know little about the profession.'Later, in a famous passage,he recomrnends the pale yolk of a town hen's
egg for painting the faces ofyoung people with cool flesh colours, but thedarker yolk of a country hen's egg for aged or swarthy persons.
cennino's methods for painting coloured draperies were also highlyspecific, and formed the basis for painting the clothed figure rightthrough the quattrocento and beyond. Essentially, colours were used intheir pure form in the deepest shadows and then lightened progressivelywith white towards the lit areas, finishing with highlights of pure white.For its time, it was a remarkably successful scheme, but there were prob-lems with it.
First, by placing the purest and most powerfully saturated colour inthe deepest shadows and progressively desaturating it towards the lights,the shadows appeared to advance and the lights appeared to recede - thevery opposite of the desired effect. secondly, the relative brightness of thepure colours was very variable: this could lead to the unbalancing of com-positions in which the brighter draperies, such as the yellows, stood outmuch more prominently than the darker ones, such as the blues. For thisreason' painters often attempted a balance of symmetry arranging theirbright colours in pairs around a central axis - a scheme now termedisochromatism.
with the cennino system, we thus have a series of colour combinationsbased on, and pre-determined by, the pure forms of the available pig-ments. cennino describes the preparation of pigments from a variety ofsources, both natural and artificial. Such colours could be reafily avail-able and inexpensive, or rare and cost a fortune: in the latter categorythe best-known is ultramarine blue (literally, from'over the sea, since itwas then found only in Afghanistan), extracted from the semi-precious
without detailed analysis it is difficult to be sure just which paintersmixed black in with their shadows.However I would mention just
oneexample n which both systemsseem o be presenton the samepanel. Inthe Trinity Alnrpiece (Figure 2), mainly by pesellino but finished by FraFfippo lippi after Pesellinobdeath in L4sr, the orange-redcloak of theright hand saint (ignoring the bottom half which is a later restoration)appears o be up-modelledwith white by the cennino method, while thered robe of the spint towards the left appears to be up- and dornm-modelledwith white and black according o the Alberti method. Notice,
Figure 2 Pesellino and Fra Filippo r'tppi, Trinity Altarpiece. (The NationalGallery, London.)
dramatic or blended imperceptibly until they disappear. Most impor-tantly for colour, the same pigments that are opaque and high-key
in eggcan, in oil, become rich, semi-transparent glazes.
The implications for colouring within paintings were immefiately
apparent. Shadows no longer had to be unrealistic pure pigments or dullydown-modelled with black. Now they could have infinite subtlety; theycould be dark and full of colour at the same time. HaIf tones could bemodelled with infinite softness. Highlights could be lushous or dazzhng.
The transition from egg tempera to oil as the principal panel-painting
medium was a much faster process in northern Europe than in Italy. By
the mid fifteenth century the switch from egg to oil was almost completein the Netherlands; in Italy it had only just begun. The precise mecha-nism by which the assimilation of oil painting into Itarian practice
occurred is still not clear. Vasari's account of Antonello da Messina travel-ling to Flanders to learn the technique from van Eyck is chronologicallyimpossible, but clearly Antonello was an early practitioner.
one recent clue has been provided by the analysis at the NationalGallery of the Ferrarese painter cosimo Tura's Allegorical Figure (Figure3), painted for the studiolo at Belfiore in the late l-450s.The lowest layers
are of egg tempera and may relate to a different composition; but the lay-ers corresponfing to the finished composition are solely of oil, used in anunequivocally Netherlandish technique of opaque underlayers modelledwith glazes. The intricate brocade sleeve is strikingly similar to that ofone of the kings in Rogier van der weyden's columba Aharpiece ofaround L455 - and indeed, other paintings by Rogier were known to bein Ferrara by that date. Some historians have even cited the possibility
that Rogier himself may have visited Ferrara and instructed Tura on apilgrimage to Rome in 1450, but this cannot be verified.
The transition from egg to oil in Italy is difficult to chart, except bymicrochemical analysis of the paintings themselves, because manypainters used oil in much the same way as they had used egg, and there isiittle visible difference in the appearance of their works.
But, essentiully, by 1500 the predominant painting medium was oil,and its versatile properties prompted painters to explore a whole range
of colouring systems that led European painting in various firectionsover the following centuries. Let us look briefly at one or two examples.
The essential ruth of Alberti's observationson the modelling of reliefpersistedand became he basicchiaroscuromode of colouring in the six-teenth century. In Sebastianodel Piombo'sRaising of Lazarus(1518),wecan seehow areasof high-keycolour are setagainstsharp,deepshadows.The whole effect is highly contrasted, precise and crisp, but essentiallyfragmented.
A century later, Caravaggio was to refine the chiaroscuromode intosomething altogether more abarospheric.Meanwhile, Leonardo da vinci
developedhis own method of achieving a magical dark harmony at firstglance derived, but in reality quite fifferent, from chiaroscuro, his was
Figure 4 Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of thc Kings. (Galleria degli Uffizi,Florence.)
that, if he wants to balance his compositions ... he must first do various
sketches on paper to see how everything goes together.'
The opposition of disegno and cohre was not simply drawing versus
colour: as we have seen, Michelangelo, the greatest exponent of disegno,
was also capable of astonishing colour. It is, rather, the method of cre-
ation: Titian's habit of creating his compositions directly in paint on the
canvas is the essenceof colare.
We can only imagine how much more aghast Vasari would have been
to read Palma Giovane's celebrated account of the older Titian at work on
such paintings as the Late Death of Actaeon.
He used o sketch n his pictureswith a greatmassof coloursas a bedorbase or his compositions.. then he used o turn his pictures o the walland eave hem therewithout lookingat them,sometimesor severalmonths.When he wanted to apply his brush again,he would examinethem with the utrnost rigour. as f theywere his mortal enemieso see fhe could find any faults.Thenhe graduallycovered hese orms and in thelast stageshe painted more with his fingersthan his brushes.
Titian paved the way for the great alla prima painters of the Baroque:
Rubens, Yelilzquez and Rembrandt. All three fell under his spell, Rubens
making copies of the great Bacchanals in Madrid, Yelilzquez seeing hispaintings daily at the Court of Philip IV and Rembrandt basing his 1640
self-portrait on Titian's Man zuith a Blue Sleeue, seen brieflv in
Amsterdam.
Each of them developed colour in highly personal ways. Rubens per-
sisted with white grounds in such luminous and brilliant works as the
L609 Samson and Delilah, painted immefiately after his return from
Italy and influenced strongly by the jewel-like colours of Adam
Elsheimer.
Rembrandt and Velizquez painted with much more limited palettes
but with a sophisticated control over their materials that is only now
being fiscovered. They used both light coloured and dark tinted grounds
and experimented with unorthodox pigment mixtures to achieve extra-
ordinarily subtle effects. In his wonderful portrait of his wife Saskia in
Arcadian Costume, Rembrandt has added the highly unusual azurite to
many parts in order to give a cool greenish tint to the whole picture. And
Saskia's waistband is a notable piece of Rembrandt bravura, testing the
has been endlesslyspun around his work, we can see hat Seurat was, n
fact, applying just two simple principles of contrast derived directly from
Cheweul. Enhanced contrast of tone is seen very clearly in the light anddark'haloes around the boys in the centre and at the right of the great
Baignadcd Asniires (p. 53) - painted in 1884before Seurat'spointillism
had begun, but retouchedwith some pointillist details in 1887.Next tothe lit sides of the boys' bofies the water has been consciouslydarkened
and next to the shadowedsidesof their bodies t hasbeen ightened.
The other contrast, hat of complementarycolours, s used ever5rwhere
in Seurat's optical mixtures, both for coloured shadows and for mutual
enhancementof adjacent areas. Around many of his later pictures, heincluded a painted pointilliste border in which the dominant colour con-
stantly changedand became he complementaryof that part of the paint-
ing nearest to it - orange next to the blue sky, red next to green grassandso on. Irr his picture of. La Crotoy of 1889 (now in Detroit) the originalpainted frame, with just such a colour scheme,still survives.
But obsessive ointillism killed spontaneity and carelessoptical mix-
tures actually killed colour as Signac, Seurat's fellow neo-Impressionist
was later to admit. Writing in 1894,he said:
Pointillage simply makes the surface of the paintings more lively, but it
does not guarantee luminosity, intensity of colour or harmony. The
complementary colours which are allies and enhanceeach other when
juxtaposed, are enemies and destroy each other if mixed, even optically. A
red and a green if juxtaposed enliven each other; but red dots and green
dots make an aggregate which is grey and colourless.
As many have since observed, that greyness is palpably there, hovering
over many neo-Impressionist paintings. To some it is part of their magic;
to others t just adds a further dimensionof unreality.
We have come a long way from the artificial colouring system of Cennino
to the equally artificial system of Seurat. But I want to leave you with a
simple image which, to me conjures up the whole charmed relationship
between painters, their materials and their subjects. t is this small land-
scapepainted in 1878 by Camille Pissarro on his own palette (Figure g).
The six colours he has used for his picture are all there around the edge,high-toned Impressionist colours out of which he has made something